Solution to water crisis is history

An approach that bore fruit ... Ian Kiernan at the Archibald
Fountain in Hyde Park yesterday. The park and fountain will use
water from Busby's Bore.Photo: Peter Rae

Wendy Frew Environment ReporterJune 1, 2006

SYDNEY could soon be tapping into a world of sandstone tunnels,
disused industrial tanks and long-forgotten water courses, in an
ambitious effort to take pressure off the city's dwindling water
supplies.

The NSW Government yesterday provided $430,000 for the first
stage of a Clean Up Australia project to restore the historic
Busby's Bore as a source of recycled water for Hyde Park and Cook
and Phillip Park.

The bore, hewn out of sandstone by convict labourers in the
1830s to pipe water to Sydney, runs 3.6 kilometres from Centennial
Park to Hyde Park. The city eventually outgrew the bore, but water
still runs through it.

In the more ambitious and costly second stage of the project, an
underground lake formed in the dead end of a 1920s derelict train
tunnel near the State Library could be used to capture and store
run-off, stormwater and seepage to irrigate the Royal Botanic
Gardens and the Domain.

The chairman of Clean Up Australia, Ian Kiernan, said the
project was important because it would initially reduce demand on
Sydney's drinking water supply by 110,000 litres a day, or enough
water to fill 40 Olympic-size swimming pools a year. It also
represented one of many local solutions that could reduce effluent
flows to the ocean, drought-proof the city's parks and gardens, and
reduce demand for precious drinking water.

Mr Kiernan said Sydney had to abandon its reliance on big
engineering fixes to solve its water shortage and instead focus on
innovative schemes that made the most of the water the city already
had.

"We are capturing water that would otherwise be wasted as it
flows to the ocean outfalls," he said. "We just have to keep
turning over rocks and finding new opportunities to save
water."

Other opportunities include using the concrete chambers under
the old White Bay power station and a disused Sydney Water
reservoir at Balmain to store stormwater that could be used for
industrial purposes.

Mr Kiernan said that by Christmas the city would be tapping into
Busby's Bore at Whitlam Square, in Oxford Street, and piping the
water to small tanks that would be built under Cook and Phillip
Park. City of Sydney Council will then use the water to irrigate
the parks.

Clean Up Australia will apply to several government agencies,
including the Federal Government's Water Smart Australia program,
to fund $7 million for the second part of the project, involving
the man-made lake under Shakespeare Place near the State Library
and World War II naval storage tanks at Woolloomooloo.